WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – The normal buzz accompanied the first game, even though it was just an exhibition.

Music played inside the locker room. Players are putting on their uniforms. They’re later warming up on Gene Keady Court well before the crowd reaches their seats and the Gold and Black Sound plays its first song. The anticipation of running down the tunnel is a tradition that is renewed.

While there was a sense of normalcy, it was anything but for Nora Kiesler.

The senior on the Purdue women’s basketball team was in the locker room, listening to the music, reviewing the scouting report and would later walk – not run – down the tunnel and watch her teammates go through warmups to prepare for the first game.

This was all new to Kiesler. The same for her teammates and her family. The decision to end her basketball career – a sport she’s played since the age of 3, which is embedded in the family’s fabric – brought numerous emotions to the surface during this time. There was no turning back.

Last season, Kiesler didn’t play in the Boilermakers’ exhibition game but knew she would return at some point during the season. She did. There would be no returning this year.

“That was really hard for me,” Kiesler said. “It’s that feeling, I will never do this again.”

Never is a long time but Kiesler’s decision to push basketball to the background and focus on her long-term health was the smart choice. It’s one she arrived at with help but five concussions in four-and-half seasons, the final one this past July during an offseason workout, provided enough evidence that it was time.

The conversations were honest and tough. With Sharon Versyp, her head coach. With Jessica Lipsett, the program’s associate director of sports medicine. With her teammates. With well-known Louisville neurologist Tad Seifert, who helped treat and provide cures for her concussions. With her mother, Courtney Dillon.

“It was very rough. A lot of tears,” Versyp said. “She has a love and passion for the game. It just ripped her apart; it ripped all of us apart. It’s been a process. She’s really struggled. I think she’s starting to turn the corner but the preseason, the first of not being in a uniform, I can’t imagine … I’ve never been through it.”

The words were hard to hear, difficult to digest and painful to accept.

“A lot of emotions,” said senior Abby Abel, a teammate, roommate and close friend of Kiesler’s. “I know she was pretty sad the first game. A lot of tears. Practices were not as real but once the games hit, she wasn’t putting on the uniform and was being on the sideline. That’s when reality hit.”

“It just ripped her apart; it ripped all of us apart. It’s been a process.”

Purdue women's basketball coach Sharon Versyp

The sport that had given Kiesler so much had now relegated her to a seat on the bench, watching the post players and providing encouragement, either in practice or during games. Her competitive playing days are over.

There were countless games in elementary, middle school, AAU and high school. She appeared in 89 career games with the Boilermakers, making two starts. Kiesler tied the program's freshman single-game record for blocked shots with seven at Penn State in 2016. She’s missed a total of 13 games in her first three seasons.

Her final game was last season when Purdue lost at Indiana in the WNIT. Kiesler played 13 minutes and scored four points.

Nora Kiesler gets around Madison Wolf of Green Bay in the first round of a 2017 NCAA tournament victory at Notre Dame.(Photo: John Terhune/Journal & Courier)

“Looking at pictures last year when she played with those sweating cheeks and the red face,” Dillon said. “We’ve been grieving it. The last game she played was the last time she ever was going to play.”

'I need this kid back'

Kiesler was heavily recruited. Stanford, Michigan State, Kansas, Purdue and others wanted the 6-foot-6 center who had a soft touch around the basket but could also hit jumpers and provide an intimidating presence on the defensive end.

The first concussion happened during her junior season at Assumption High School in Louisville. It cost her 12 hours of memory. She woke up in the hospital the next morning with no idea what had happened the night before.

“She was so slow,” Dillon remembered. “She couldn’t put things together and that’s when I started getting scared. I could’ve cared less about basketball at that point. I need this kid back.”

The four remaining concussions took place at Purdue – three in six months in 2016, including one when the Boilermakers played at Ball State in December. Dillon was watching from her home in Louisville.

“It does help me understand that life is so much bigger than basketball and basketball has meant so much to me my entire life.”

Purdue women's basketball senior Nora Kiesler

“I really wanted to throw up as soon as I saw it,” she said.

The fifth – and final one - happened last July. It came during a 6 a.m. workout. She received an elbow to the face. Again. Kiesler was being trained differently to avoid missing games in her final year.

“I took every precaution to be ready,” Kiesler said. “God had a different plan for me.”

Dillon was told by the coaching staff and the athletic trainers her contact was “minimal” and Kiesler had a “really maximum reaction to it.” She blacked out and became disoriented.

“They kept waiting for a trajectory where a hit like that wouldn’t have an effect on her,” Dillon said. “In the case of other people, they would’ve gotten right back on again.”

By this time, Kiesler was receiving care from Seifert. Botox treatments. Maximum doses of different medications and vitamins to ward off headaches and migraines, a significant problem the last four-and-half years limiting Kiesler’s workouts and impacting her overall quality of life. She was placed on a 24-hour IV to help reset her nervous system during the summer of 2017.

“He gave her an extended basketball life,” Dillon said.

While Seifert had diagnosed remedies to keep Kielser on the floor and finish out her career, the final hit was the last one.

“We sat in his office,” Kiesler recalled. “He said, ‘This is a conversation I never wanted to have with you. This is a decision I never wanted to make. I can’t let you go back on the floor. I think it’s time to stop playing.’ ”

Strong but truthful words. Others have said it to Kiesler, but she kept wanting to come back. She wasn’t in denial as much as trying to explore every opportunity to keep her career playing alive. Just one more season, her final one with the Boilermakers.

Seifert told Kiesler she would live a normal life if she stopped playing basketball. The short-term emotional setback would dissipate and Kiesler would embrace the long-term prognosis of a healthy future.

Kiesler weighed the next 10 months versus the next 60 or more years.

“It doesn’t make it easier and it doesn’t make the grieving process hurt any less,” Kiesler said. “It does help me understand that life is so much bigger than basketball and basketball has meant so much to me my entire life. It’s not all that I am, all that I will be or what I what to be known for.”

Dillon was in the room with her daughter as Seifert delivered the news.

“She knew it was coming but it was still devastating,” Dillon said. “The look on her face – when the tears weren’t rolling down her cheeks – it’s everything you didn’t want to hear even though you knew it was coming.”

Basketball withdrawal

Nora Kiesler of Purdue blocks a shot by Nia Hollie of Michigan State Saturday, February 24, 2018, at Mackey Arena. Purdue fell to Michigan State 82-68.(Photo: John Terhune/Journal & Courier)

From that point, Kiesler didn’t touch a basketball.

Not until the Boilermakers played in the U.S. Virgin Islands over Thanksgiving. Kiesler was angry. She couldn’t bring herself to pick up a basketball. It was too emotional.

“I was upset this had happened and I lost something I loved,” she said.

However, one of her teammates needed a shooting partner as Purdue spent nearly a week practicing and playing three games over three days. She rebounded. She made passes. She didn’t participate in any drills and eased herself into familiar feelings.

“It felt good because I did it on my own terms,” she said. “Nobody was telling me, ‘Nora, you have to do this.’ It wasn’t awkward or uncomfortable. It felt good.”

Abel watched Kiesler on that day. She knew her friend was starting to move forward.

“It was good to see her involved. It was very cool to see,” Abel said. “That’s when I knew she embraced the whole coach, facilitator and was eager to help in the ways that she can.”

Still a Boilermaker

Kiesler has settled into her new role.

Captain. Coach. Adviser. Instructor. Cheerleader. If it happens off the floor, Kiesler is usually involved.

“You want your kids to be happy and healthy and I had to watch her be unhappy to get healthy”

“For coach V to give me a role of still being vocal and share my basketball IQ with our younger players and help them understand why you set a screen a certain way and what we’re looking for on certain plays,” Kiesler said. “It does give me some kind of purpose. Kudos to my teammates for accepting that and looking at me and saying, ‘You don’t play. We’re not going to listen to you.’ "

That was never going to be the case. Kiesler has the respect of her teammates and she respects them enough where the roles are completely understood. But it’s taken time.

Kiesler is enthusiastic on the sidelines, cheering her teammates on and also providing insight to the team’s young post players.

“At first, it was a little turbulent to accept that basketball is done,” Abel said. “For all of us, basketball has been our lives since we can remember. When she realized she could make an impact and still use her gifts of knowing basketball and being a student of the game in a positive manner.”

Nora Kiesler shoots the ball in a 2018 victory over Illinois at Mackey Arena.

(Photo: John Terhune/Journal & Courier)

Versyp wasn’t about to remove Kiesler from impacting her younger players, especially in the post. Fatou Diagne and Nyagoa Gony still need guidance, and Kiesler remains capable of providing instruction.

“She’s been through it. She understands, she understands me, she understands the mindset of what we want. She’s a coach off the floor,” Versyp said. "When there’s timeouts, she’s talking to the kids – trying to fire them up and being really positive.”

This is Kiesler’s new normal.

She’s accepted it but that doesn’t mean Kiesler is through dreaming about playing again. Maybe a Senior Day appearance for a handful of seconds, just enough for one last applause and one last game experience with her teammates.

Regardless, Kiesler has shed the headaches and the migraines. She’s able to work out without worrying about how she’ll feel and whether she’ll have a productive day.

She completed a double major in management and marketing in the Krannert School of Management in three years and is currently working on her MBA at Purdue. Through the first eight weeks in the MBA program, the two-time Academic All-Big Ten honoree posted a 4.0-grade point average.

Her life that was once dictated by headaches, dark days and tough conversations is back under control.

“You want your kids to be happy and healthy and I had to watch her be unhappy to get healthy,” Dillon said. “She’s handled this with as much maturity as you can conjure up from a 22-year old. That piece of having her back is bright and shiny and fun and giving me a hard way to go and is sure of herself and happy, it’s worth it.

“To know I could get back the kid who could see a future for herself and who feels like she’s a contributor again and sees value in what she’s doing.”